/**
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */

package org.apache.kafka.streams.processor;

/**
 * A processor supplier that can create one or more {@link Processor} instances.
 *
 * It is used in {@link TopologyBuilder} for adding new processor operators, whose generated
 * topology can then be replicated (and thus creating one or more {@link Processor} instances)
 * and distributed to multiple stream threads.
 *
 * @param <K> the type of keys
 * @param <V> the type of values
 */
public interface ProcessorSupplier<K, V> {

    /**
     * Return a new {@link Processor} instance.
     *
     * @return  a new {@link Processor} instance
     */
    Processor<K, V> get();
}
